Extract from pages 26 and 28
TOURS
Inner drive
- In Tours, no artistic life is possible.
Former Curator of the Museums of Tours and Amboise - Curator of the Museum of Fontainebleau.
(Remarks received by J. Sergoff.)
- The city must welcome all forms of art.
Jean ROYER,
Deputy Mayor of the city of Tours.
(Speech, Museum of Light, 21-3-1969)
I. - On both sides, attempts abound, but Tours, let us be sure, consumes them abundantly; particularly fond of a sort of regional dessert, embellished in various ways and whose designation always retains the same root: FAILURE. The climate, the art of living there and the heaviness that sits them in the same place do not facilitate the digestion of the ingested phenomena, in the cramped car parks that are allotted to them, and they cohabit in numbers, fomenting cabals and abandonment; The attention is exhausted, the appetite is reduced and from ulcer to ulcer the city of gros intentin moves towards a derisory future where each time it will be necessary, until the establishment of a permanence for this purpose, the sentinels will prowl to make sure of the good functioning of the systems of opening and closing of the halls of station and each of the compartments of the wagon where the safety could itself only increase the good functioning of the cabals leading to the ABANDON.
II. - It is fortunate that one day Valentiner had the idea of enrolling at the Beaux-Arts, only to exclude himself a few months later without the slightest loss and benefit from the fracas that made him the catalyst of those who, bored with the old files, took part in the conversation. First of all, a "small contemporary art show" at the Galerie Sainte-Croix brought together Aimelet, Lemerre, Sergeff, Valentiner and Vitany; Tours was somewhat surprised, not accustomed to the events of a mostly unnoticed group.
Then in November 1968, again at the Galerie Sainte-Croix, an exhibition of Lemerre's work over a period of five or six years, another milestone revealing the current impossibility of promoting, receiving or even supporting any kind of artistic life in Tours - unnoticed for the most part. Permanent conversation, strengthening links, clearing a set of perspectives by a slow and progressive development of our territory - we live HERE now - creating from scratch a climate soon favourable to the steps of a living art. Environs offers us the current state of propagation.
Ill. - AIMELET animates some structures whose importance must be the mechanism, elusive in the moment it provokes, simply because it gives the change to what should not be considered as a work of art.
COLLANDRE composes an imagery whose fragmentation denotes the various aspects of the need to escape: from the Mediterranean club to the speed of the automobile.
GUS (MARTINEAU), in their abundance, details the articles of his multi-branch shop. Incoercible on the periphery of sarcasm, dismantles different networks of attitudes manipulating armbands, emblems, signs and slogans in the importance and ridiculousness of their situation.
LEMERRE: Attempts to free the approach to certain residences still placed under close surveillance and whose current conditioning is busy clogging up the access routes.
SAINT LOUIS is meticulously working out the principles of its evolution.
SERGEFF. Contaminated by an exacting experience, prey to doubt, Sergeff in his attempt measures the extent of the crossing it implies.
VALENTINER. Observation of certain combinations of circumstances reduced to the ambiguity of their simplest propositions; violent circumstances whose approximation testifies to the alteration of their daily deferment.
Charles LE BOUIL,
Tours, March 1969.
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